"If [insert presidential nominee here] wins the election, I'm moving to Canada," has been a popular refrain for the last year or so, but it turns out it was more than an empty threat.

On Tuesday night, as polling results rolled in, the Citizenship and Immigration Canada website was temporarily forced offline. Apparently, it was overwhelmed by Americans considering a move up north over a Donald Trump presidency.

As Vox reports, folks looking for information on the site yesterday were met with a server error—similar to one you might find if a page were enduring a calculated DDoS attack. The same thing happened in March, a day after Trump won the Super Tuesday primaries.

As of press time, Canada's immigration site was back online, allowing US residents to find all the details needed to start planning a move to the Great White North.

Related

That was not the only election-related site glitch this week. The official Trump/Pence 2016 page briefly featured a "quirk," as Slate calls it, that allowed anyone to insert any text into the header space. Enterprising users found that simply typing a word, phrase, or emoji into the URL allowed them to change the title to read, for instance, "Trump is bad at Internet," "Congratulations to President-Elect Clinton," or a smiling pile of poop. The site has since been updated, and the press release archive link now directs visitors back to the homepage.

Meanwhile, popular Internet haunt 4chan may be to blame for recent issues with one of Hillary Clinton's automated dialer programs used to oversee voter calls. According to The Verge, workers at NextGen Climate on Monday noticed complications with the platform, which was disconnected for "hours at a time" in the afternoon.

The hack, which reportedly used the same Mirai botnet code employed during last month's DDoS attack, was alluded to in a Sunday 4chan post warning of a DDoS on any tools used by the Clinton campaign. The message has since been replaced with a congratulatory note to Donald Trump.

About the Author

Stephanie joined PCMag in May 2012, moving to New York City from Frederick, Md., where she worked for four years as a multimedia reporter at the second-largest daily newspaper in Maryland. She interned at Baltimore magazine and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (in the town of Indiana, in the state of Pennsylvania) with a degree in ... See Full Bio

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